The End

Admittedly we haven’t been very good about posting to our blog these past few days, and now that our trip is over we switch back to the past tense. Perhaps we haven’t said much because really we haven’t done much. Our last few days in Berlin were spent just kind of hanging out. The weather continued to get better so we did a lot of walking around, mostly in Prenzlauerberg and Mitte.

On Tuesday we made our way over to Friedrichsein to the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining (nearly) continuous stretch of the Berlin Wall. It is really quite an experience to walk along the wall, to see the now exposed rebar that supports the eight-foot high concrete mass that separated East from West for so many years, to be able to cross back and forth at points, to see both sides at the same time from the same position.

Tuesday evening we met up with Don again and had pizza at Ron Teleski Canadian Pizza. The pizza was quite good, and inexpensive by the slice (by the massive slice, cut from a 24” pizza). A gigantic moose head trophy from which the restaurant takes its name takes up a good part of the space. Ron Teleski is the taxidermist who stuffed the moose head. After dinner we went with Don to staamtisch at a bar in Pberg and then from there we took Don to the Absinthe Depot.

Wednesday was more of the same, wandering around, and we finally made our way to the Gemäldegallerie, which could be considered the Met of Berlin. From there we decided to go back to der Imbiss W for a third time and we have no regrets about that. From der Imbiss W we went back to the Absinthe Depot for a third time and, again, we have no regrets about that either.

Thursday was our last full day in Berlin and we took it pretty easy. We walked around our favorite neighborhoods again and had lunch at DaDa Falafel, which was the best falafel we’ve ever tasted. We paid a final visit to the Absinthe Depot. It was funny to realize that we were becoming familiar with the city and we started to notice that we were passing places we’d been to in our first couple of days in Berlin. We had dinner with Don again at a small Italian place near our apartment, and then we all went to the Barbie Bar, the gay bar that we happened upon without realizing it was a gay bar our first week in Berlin.

As we write this final post, we are sitting very comfortably in business class, about an hour out of JFK. We aren’t sure why we got upgraded, but I suppose we deserve it since our flight out of Berlin was delayed two hours and we missed our 4:30 flight to SFO.